Tag: ptsd

Under the kings, men fought wars for territory. Even most “religious wars” boiled down to this basic concern: who controlled the territory between domains.

Then came the Enlightenment, the Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, introducing us to Ideological war. Now men fought for ideas, which assumed that people actually understood not only those ideas, but what their effects would be if put into practice.

Children of the ages after war for ideology became children of perpetual war. Unlike territorial wars, ideological warfare does not end until one ideology has total control of the world. Every belief system knows that until it has a space of its own, it is under constant threat of being replaced; with ideology however, the belief itself is in question, and so anyone who believes differently must be squashed lest they spread the word that one can both ignore the ideology and have a perfectly fulfilling life.

Wars of ideology seek territory, also, but it is not land; it is human minds. They seek not just military victory, but conquest of all opinion. They are not won until they do this because, in the hands of fickle voters and other public opinion, a mild hiccup like a hurricane can be blamed on the party in power and remove them. Voters and other public opinioneers do not distinguish between a fault of the system and a crisis like a temporary economic downturn. Thus control is essential to prevent any competing system from possibly thriving during those times.

All of us who grew up in the West grew up in the shade of World War II. Itself a continuation of World War I, the “war to end all wars” by conquering the world for liberal democracy, WWII was the latest iteration in a line of ideological wars leading back to the Napoleonic Wars. We were not fighting for practical issues like territory and nation, but for banners, symbols and the ideologies they represented. WWII continued through the 1990s through the Cold War and now has transitioned to post-colonial wars which amount to remnants of the WWII order battling it out over control of former colonies.

With the conversion of the West to full ideology following WWII out of a desire to avoid being compared to Hitler’s National Socialists, Mussolini and Franco’s Fascists, and the imperial regime of Japan, the root of ideological warfare took hold in the internal affairs of the West. This is where the Frankfurt School, Gramscian social engineering, and Cultural Marxism come into play: instead of fighting wars to unite our population, set them against one another, with one group steadily growing because it both adheres to ideology and rebels against instances of it. Thus we get 1960s rebels, who preach a radicalized version of what the founding fathers espoused, yet attack every social institution with sexual liberation, drug use and moral abeyance.

In recent years, a backlash has begun. Instead of dictating society by ideological goals, we should look at engineering concepts, say these dissenters. Look at what we know to work, and apply that, instead of trying to achieve prescriptive ideological accomplishments. Focus on how to build a society as we would build an operating system, garden or factory assembly line. We know from 6,000 years of history what fails, what works to an adequate level, and what promotes thriving. The choice of what we desire is thus within our hands, and we can use the corresponding methods to avoid this calamity.

Ideology does not like this approach. Ideology rewards goals that cannot be attained as they keep the actual goal in sight which is the perpetuation of the ideology. The best war is one that never ends, with an enemy who can be blamed for all things, and all of us needing to sacrifice to avoid losing. This scenario unraveled early in the days of the French Revolution: if something did not work, for example a local leader stole all the bread, accuse him of being a Royalist and execute him. Onward! The USSR employed the same approach, as do most ideological regimes, including in the West where we simply ridicule the person in the press, accuse them of having bad ideas, and “execute” them by ensuring they will never work again.

The power of ideology is that it can capture dissent. It is, after all, the language of Revolutionaries itself, so any rebellion belongs to it in spirit. It also has no problem sacrificing its members so the ideology can move on; it will execute the bread-stealer, and use this as a “teachable moment” for the ideology. Any rebellion inevitably leads to a declaration by individuals that they feel under-represented in power or wealth, so the response is to spread the power and wealth, which further reduces any enemies of the ideology. This enables the ideology to spread through a process of destruction and saprophytic nourishment from the remnants of decay. Its end-game is collapse, at which point what will exist is a permanently militarized, genderless, raceless, cultureless, historyless population who require strong leaders to command them — as is the norm in the third world everywhere.

We who seek to unseat the ideology and end the ideological wars must strive to avoid carving out too little as we excise this infestation. The whole thing must go: the idea of the individual as autonomous moral actor, of a society based on conflict and compromise, of what should be versus what works. We have grown up in a miserable world — where leaders are liars, women are whores, jobs are jails, religion is schizophrenia, society is commerce, morality is larceny, and our purpose is to be a Worker and to uphold ideology while ignoring the consequent existential emptiness — as a result of the ongoing ideological warfare. Children of the West, liberate yourselves from liberation!

As noted before, few people know what to make of the millennial generation. They tend to either portray them as saints, or as narcissists, without much analysis into why.

Part of the reason for this lack of analysis is the simple fact of time and causality. Millennials are the product of past generations, both biologically and in terms of how the decisions of those generations shaped our society.

In other words, when we look at millennials, it doesn’t make sense to judge them in a vacuum. We have to judge the decisions that produced them, including changes in our social, educational and political system.

It sounds somewhat cynical to say this, but while people aren’t “products” of their environment, they are influenced by it. Children especially take what they are taught at face value and continue to do so until their 30s or 40s.

The primary concerns vocalized about millennials are their narcissism, media addiction, political correctness and sense of entitlement. All of these point to coping behavior for an underlying symptom.

The ugly fact about millennials is that they show the signs of something we should have after several wars learned to recognize: PTSD and/or abuse victim behavior. They show the signs of being imprinted by a stressful event and then, in order to keep going, normalizing that sort of event. Let’s look back at the events in their lives.

I identify the millennials as those born from the late 1970s through late 1990s, depending on where they grew up since social trends hit across the country at different speeds. These kids inherited the full blast results of the 1968 leftward swing in the West, caused by the student rebellions in Europe and the hippies in the USA.

During those upheavals, “new” ideas (from 1789) were injected into public education, public television and news, and society at large. These were: birth control, abortion, multiculturalism, equality with subsidies/welfare, moral relativism and atheism.

While the 1968 people — Baby Boomers — advanced these ideas as theory, it was the millennials who grew up under them. Generation X didn’t, at least until the mid-1970s, because they still had the older generations teaching them. It was when the hippies grew up and took over that the zombie ritual really began.

Millennials act like people who have been through a traumatic event and expect it to repeat. In a Stockholm Syndrome pattern, they are squeakily and dogmatically PC to the point where to Generation Xers they come across as downright Soviet human robots. Why this? It was what got their Baby Boomer teachers off their backs.

What about their narcissism and entitlement? This is more Baby Boomer teaching, which amounts to a parallel with classic Socialist/Communist ideals. The principle there is reward before performance, which is translated into “self-esteem boosting” exercises such as convincing everyone that they’re special, that they’re important, etc.

But the flip side of this is that you have to tolerate everyone else. Much as it did in Russia, this has produced in the USA a group of people who are entirely insulated in their own bubbles. Stay aloof lest others ask something from you; in the meantime, demand whatever you can and don’t think about the consequences beyond the individual and the present moment. That is the consequence of self-esteem building: it makes precious snowflakes out of everyone, which makes people want to avoid each others’ drama while keeping their own demands from society high. It has become an exercise in gaming the system.

Narcissism also fits in with those who have been abused or experience PTSD. They have fallen into a world of themselves, mainly because the world is too chaotic and threatening. These conditions verge on schizophrenia because the feedback loop with external reality has been interrupted and replaced by a need for self-validation in the absence of clear instructions. This occurs in any situation where an abuser becomes the master and final word, or plays God in other terms. The abusee becomes accustomed with the role of following instructions, or doing whatever they want and waiting for the God-figure to intervene and tell them what to do. As also occurred in Soviet Russia, independent thinking or simply noticing reality goes away and people become dependent on authority. Millennials also exhibit this behavior.

While it’s easy to criticize millennials for living in Bubble Worlds, where they act as if they are in a planet constructed of their own minds and the only consequences that matter are their own thoughts, whims or desires, it’s more important to look at the situation that inculcated them in this view. They have never grown up in a stable society. For them, the USA was always a half third-world nation, wracked by crime, corruption, public filth, and with “culture” composed of fast food and horrible pop stars. They grew up with hip-hop, pornography and television violence as the norm. They generally come from broken homes, where divorce, infidelity and familial strife are everyday events. They do not have any expectation of meeting a partner with a low sexual partner count, which is determinative of likelihood of divorce, and thus they expect the same for themselves.

In short, much like abuse victims, millennials have zero expectation that any of the big decisions in life will be determined by their own actions. All is in the hands of the external, in this case the collective formed of other people’s bad decisions and the decision of egalitarian society to defend their right to whatever insanity they can pay for.

Millennial-bashing is too easy, as is letting them off the hook. What they need is a return to non-abusive parenting, one in which it is made clear what is expected from them and what will be rewarded and what will be punished. It would help to have a society that is not chronically unstable, and some constants in their lives like culture, religion and family. It would also be good to replace reward-first systems like self-esteem boosting and welfare with performance-first systems like free markets and actual competition.

Until something like that happens, the millennials are not going to be our only zombie generation. Every generation will be, increasingly so, until we’re left with people like those Communism left behind: rootless, clueless, careless and selfish, yet simultaneously addicted to the state ideology that is both their Saviour and Master.

An estimated one hundred young men left the Netherlands to go to Syria to help their brethren fighting in the civil war. More are leaving soon.

Investigation suggests that this reverse migration consists of Netherlands-born muslims, usually with pretty decent school grades, radicalized only after receiving feedback from a small group of similarly-minded people and the immensely popular “internet imams.” Other euro-countries are also seeing the rise of these “sharia-tourists” too. Mosques, parents, politicians and independent groups in Syria are discouraging youth from coming to the country to fight. They opt for the most reasonable alternative, which is giving money for aid.

Until recently, discussion on this topic has been limited. All current discussions produce no answers, only the same circular reasoning. The result is that important questions are ignored in order to preserve the binary nature of politics. Since votes are like purchases, political ideas are “sold” to groups cultivated by promises. You are either good or bad, with us or against us. But there is another dimension to this situation.

The fundamental question is this: if a citizen of a European nation stands for introducing sharia law in that state, what in earth’s name is he doing in democratic, Jewish, Christian, pluralist Europe? People are like this are completely incompatible with the surrounding society they live in, and yet are mysteriously out of sight by the governments of such states. It is not surprising that they choose to leave for a society that, while perhaps less affluent, is more compatible with the values that are clearly close to their hearts.

As we all notice daily, life is full of choices. We each as individuals make choices every day. Some important, some unimportant. But we all have to live by the consequences of the choices we make. If I want to migrate to another society that offers what seems like a better life to me by my own individual standard, then I’m free to start working there with a visa and from there build up my own position.

Not all of us should make such a deal. People work best and contribute the most when they are comfortable with the people and society around them.

As a country, you have a responsibility to not infect the other apples in the basket. And that leads to the more dangerous questions about this issue. What kind of signal do you give the law-abiding European worker when governments respond to this situation by making two sets of rules, one for the Europeans and one for the immigrant-born? Is a democracy injected with skilled fighters, who fought for sharia law on another continent, a safer place? How are we going to take care of these people when they return maimed and with PTSD? But most importantly, if we’re going to have people here, should we make sure the values of their hearts are compatible with our culture, values and habits?

I can imagine that Americans have way more intellectual context about this, since they are surrounded by soldiers who fought to protect the American way of life. Europeans who are engulfed by ex-sharia fighters do not need PhDs to tell that this situation is unstable. Unless your brains are caught in an Amsterdam threesome with a bag of marijuana, a cheap hooker and a tram, you can see how illogical this two-faced approach is for Europe.

Fundamentally, this is a question of responsibility. If I want to fight a battle for sharia rights, than it is my right to do so! However, at that point my government has also got the right to cut me loose and to refuse to let me participate in western society anymore. At that point, I have chosen a different values system than the one that is European. This way each party finds the surroundings that are most comfortable to them.

This is exactly what needs to be done. Reverse migration shows us the choices that people make when they think about values, and the schism that they keep in their hearts. Instead of forcing migrants to abandon their values, we should stop being two-faced and state clearly what we value. This forces each person to make the choice and face the consequences. If someone is incompatible here, we should cut them loose to find a place that fits their needs.

The art to making it big as a blog is to tell people that something screwed them. However, it’s best not to pick actual causes, but intermediate ones. Beating a real cause takes a lot of power. Getting a bunch of people mad at an intermediate, or mad enough to buy your book, is much more achievable.

If those of us who bring you this blog had any financial sense, we would not be identifying actual problems like crowdism or demographic decline, but looking at intermediates that make good punching bags. Obama. Christians. Corporations. Satan.

Finding a good punching bag makes you feel good. Instead of seeing the broad problem of re-organizing society, you can single out a little tiny piece and rage against it, then consider the job done and go home. It’s easier and more emotionally satisfying to find something to blame.

The only glitch is that by doing so, you miss out on the actual culprit. Such is the case with the following article, in which some people (who should know better) blame the problems of the “lost generation” or millennials on the economy:

But sometime in the past 30 years, someone has hit the brakes and Americans — particularly young Americans — have become risk-averse and sedentary…

A lot, but the biggest change has been that the social programs of the 1960s have come into full fruition. The Reagan 1980s after all were sort of a rearguard action against the encroaching liberal reforms that from 1964 onward — when the first baby boomers hit 18 — had been rising in power.

The “lost generation” are the people who inherited the true weight of liberal reforms. Sexual liberation means divorce and faithless relationships. Social welfare means a glacial economy and parasitic government. All forms of “equality” mean constant internal class warfare. Civil rights means open immigration and increasing internal division.

Millennials are not the first to face this decline. Before them, the Generation Xers were known as “slackers” and “dropouts” for their own tendency to retreat into the basement and shut the door on a world gone mad.

Why did they think the world had gone mad? Each individual liberal reform had bad results, but the effect of liberal reforms as a whole is that you no longer have a society with purpose. You have a giant shopping mall where nothing has any meaning, except purchasing things and individual drama

Each day, people go to work for the purpose of sustaining themselves. They have families and hobbies. But there is a sense of going through the motions and being in shock, which is why people behave like such zombies, craving power, wealth and prestige without knowing why.

And yet they are afraid to rock the boat. They are grateful for what they have, even as they are miserable. They insist they are not discontented. They pick one team to cheer for, find a reason to feel superior to others, and keep going through the motions.

The term “Stockholm Syndrome” was coined in the early 70’s to describe the puzzling reactions of four bank employees to their captor. On August 23, 1973, three women and one man were taken hostage in one of the largest banks in Stockholm. They were held for six days by two ex-convicts who threatened their lives but also showed them kindness. To the world’s surprise, all of the hostages strongly resisted the government’s efforts to rescue them and were quite eager to defend their captors. Indeed, several months after the hostages were saved by the police, they still had warm feelings for the men who threatened their lives. Two of the women eventually got engaged to the captors.

The Stockholm incident compelled journalists and social scientists to research whether the emotional bonding between captors and captives was a “freak” incident or a common occurrence in oppressive situations. They discovered that it’s such a common phenomenon that it deserves a name. Thus the label “Stockholm Syndrome” was born. It has happened to concentration camp prisoners, cult members, civilians in Chinese Communist prisons, pimp-procured prostitutes, incest victims, physically and/or emotionally abused children, battered women, prisoners of war, victims of hijackings, and of course, hostages. Virtually anyone can get Stockholm Syndrome it the following conditions are met:

Perceived threat to survival and the belief that one’s captor is willing to act on that threat

The captive’s perception of small kindnesses from the captor within a context of terror

Threat to survival: constant crime, instability, job loss, fears for health and reproductive success in the media, dubious international politics and constant wars.

Small kindnesses: society throws us a few bones in the form of pity and handouts.

Isolation: any perspectives other than that of a technocratic liberal democracy are considered insane, racist, hateful, voodoo, etc.

No escape: let me know if you can think of one. If you run away to the woods, it’s just a matter of time before someone converts those woods into a McDonald’s.

If you find yourself wondering why every year, things seem worse and people seem even more paralyzed to act against them, consider this: people are afraid things will get worse, so they’re clinging to society in order to appease it. Like abused children, they conform — and then beg.

What makes this society so powerful is its duality. On one hand, it is permissive and so everything is “OK;” on the other hand, this permissiveness causes such vast social instability that we are each islands, trying to duck crime, abuse, isolation, poverty and other forms of social chaos.

The result is shell-shocked people who through the motions in order to avoid things getting worse. They are paralyzed by fear of what could happen, based on the fact that bad things happen all the time and nothing is done. They are psychologically scarred and coping as best they can.

Symptoms of PTSD fall into three main categories:

“Reliving” the event, which disturbs day-to-day activity

Flashback episodes, where the event seems to be happening again and again

Repeated upsetting memories of the event

Repeated nightmares of the event

Strong, uncomfortable reactions to situations that remind you of the event

Avoidance

Emotional “numbing,” or feeling as though you don’t care about anything

These symptoms are not shocking for anyone who has observed modern people closely. They are not overt, but a society based on distraction and evasion of hard truths fits the profile of an escapist trauma victim. They most closely describe the character of our society at large.

When we look at these together with the Stockholm Syndrome, we can see how a person with PTSD would be the perfect candidate for Stockholm Syndrome. Traumatized once, and shown a small kindness, they will act to achieve more of that kindness. They will obey authority even as it pushes them toward horrible deeds.

Milgram recruited subjects for his experiments from various walks in life. Respondents were told the experiment would study the effects of punishment on learning ability…”Teachers” were asked to administer increasingly severe electric shocks to the “learner” when questions were answered incorrectly.

Shock levels were labeled from 15 to 450 volts…In response to the supposed jolts, the “learner” (actor) would begin to grunt at 75 volts; complain at 120 volts; ask to be released at 150 volts; plead with increasing vigor, next; and let out agonized screams at 285 volts. Eventually, in desperation, the learner was to yell loudly and complain of heart pain…Finally, at 330 volts the actor would be totally silent…

Like its partner experiment, the “Stanford Prison Experiment,” the Milgram experiment has been presented to us as a way of explaining how ordinary people give in to evil authority. If we read it more cynically, we could say it shows how ordinary people exhibit Stockholm Syndrome-esque responses to contemporary authority.

Paralysis occurs in our society because when it began falling apart, a series of tragedies occurred. The French Revolution was the first, but after that a series of wars, genocides, etc. happened. We try to play nice with our captors by reasoning that these are results of bad people or ideas among us. The more likely truth is that our society is diseased, self-destructive, a Late Roman period of collapse. It is the source of these problems.

We will remain paralyzed as long as we do what is popular and cast around for some discrete, separate entity to blame. As long as we have Satan, Hitler, Stalin or Kony to blame, we can pretend that our society is not rotting from within. The paralysis wins and we stagger onward, sleepwalking to doom.

The modern mind is fundamentally divorced not only from reality as a state, but as a motive. In its delusional state, the brain frenetically confirms its own hypotheses because it cannot compare them to reality and thus determine how fit they are as solutions. For this reason it has nothing to consider but its initial assumptions, which it soon begins to defend vigorously. As a result, any ideas that contradict these are seen not as ideas but as acts of aggression against it, and the bearers of the modern mindset lash out at them.

It is for this reason that thinkers attempting to escape the modern have hit on a new hypothesis: our worldview is broken, not our methods. Most systems until this point have tried to regulate method, by changing economic or political systems, or trying to re-educate our language or visual preferences. While these efforts have each changed some traits of our societies, they have not changed the basic trend, which remains consistent. For this reason, liberalism has failed; conservatism has failed; even reformers have failed. Politics cannot save us, nor can economics, nor can military might. We must rethink our psychology.

PTSD

Although studies about the effects of living under a clear dominant authority, such as totalitarianism or the Stockholm Syndrome, are familiar, few have studied what happens under passive authority. Passive authority is created by an assumption that defines reality, and because its power is predicated on that hypothesis, a tendency to punish those who contradict that worldview. In passive authority, those who deviate from unstated rules are punished, where totalitarianism relies clearly states its rules and punishes those who oppose them. Passive authority is a superior mechanism for control because it does not act aggressively against detractors without first having construed them as the first to act with aggression. It is always the victim; always the well-intentioned parental figure, abused by its offspring, and thus justified in punishing them. Since its power relies on its assumptions regarding reality, anyone who differs with those is the worst kind of ideological criminal.

This leads us to the interesting condition called “Post Tramautic Stress Disorder,” or PTSD. It occurs frequently whenever there is a disturbing or violent even that shapes the life of its victim, but it almost always happens when there is such an event and no way to reconstruct the self afterwards, such as by justifying the event as necessary or good. Most of us are familiar with the high rate of PTSD in returning Vietnam veterans, but a lack of corresponding rate in soldiers from the second world war, despite in many ways a more horrifying experience. Many theorize that the reason is very simple: veterans in the 1940s came home to congratulations, while Vietnam vets never had a clear positive consensus coming back to them from society. As a result, they were forced into the role of “bad guy” by the passivity of a society which would send them to a war and then, as a result of its own indecision, blame them for its extremity.

PTSD describes most of the people in modern society on a day-to-day basis. Although they are functional, they are in shock at a sublime level, such that most of what they do is part of a cover story that affirms their sanity and self-worth. Like secret agents in the field, they use their cover story to reinforce their sense of self, which is actually defined in a completely different way, since their internal agenda does not match the goals they would reveal in conversation. They are secret agents for their own safety and fulfilment. They can never tell their actual motivations to those around them.

This is a consequence of passive unreality. When we are all expected to silently agree on something that is not real, those who speak out for truth are the aggressors, and the passive society retaliates against them (ostracization, boycott, crucifixion). For this reason, those who dare glimpse the truth are traumatized by realizing that the knowledge upon which we need to act is the very knowledge that we deny, and they spot then not just an error in our society, but a fundamental corruption so vast that it will if not destroy us turn us into creatures of servitude to the most base and boring existence possible.

Disadvantages

Another area in which the passive society dominates: we live in a time where people cannot tell the difference between a disadvantage and a failure. A disadvantage is a negative consequence of some act when the act still attains its goal; for example, if I need to put wood on the fire but I bark my shin on the woodpile. In that case, it’s illogical to say “I can never build a fire again, because I must bark my shin” – the fire must be made, so the possibility of barked shin is taken as a disadvantage. On the other hand, a failure is when an act cannot achieve its goal. If my goal is to make a fire, and I attempt to do it by machine-gunning the woodpile, then I have failed (there may also be disadvantages).

Lashing out against disadvantages supports a passive society. First, assume that the status quo is a working solution which will always get better – people who feel that modern society is fixing the past fall into this category, one which is “progressive” in that people believe we’re on the path to progress and therefore, even if things are bad, they will get better because we are on the path of progress. Second, take any argument against the status quo and find a disadvantage with it, thus discard it. If we make our fires outside, the thought of making them inside is immediately discredited because we might bark our shins. This argument against disadvantages is passive because it denies the disadvantages brought on by the current system, and essentially demands a perfect, Utopian, flawless solution in order to change course – and when we drop that pretense, we see it’s all a big logic trap designed to reject any course but the present. You might even call it inertia and not be wrong. This passive view of the world is fundamentally negative, in that it assumes there is only one solution, and we already have it, thus we must accept what is wrong and not seek to change it, because any change will bring about some disadvantages. People even argue this in terms of lives lost; we cannot have change, as someone might die, even if that person is crazy and dies because of his or her craziness. Therefore, they rigidly stick to a failing course of action and lash out at anyone who proposes something different, as those disadvantages might not only inconvenience them, but might illustrate the complete illogical farce that is modern society.

Brainless

Our society is passive because it defers to the judgment of individuals. It defers to the judgment of individuals because, lacking a common cultural or philosophical goal, it unites itself through the power of vast crowds of individuals who, as granular political entities, want nothing more than an increase in personal wealth and power and social prestige. The Crowd is formed of those who cannot lead, so their agenda is to destroy leaders, and then to drag down standards for earning wealth and gaining power and achieving social prestige, so that even idiots can do it. The Crowd likes the kind of system that rewards you for spending the time, not doing something genius or unusually powerful.

This makes for a brainless society. Our opinions depend on the opinions of others, which means that no one is leading, because the way one “leads” is to figure out what other people are thinking. We’re all asking each other what we should think and, since there’s no way to get a clear thought of that process, always concluding that we should keep on roughly the same course and beat down anyone who threatens it. To liven things up, we rename our course and re-construe it as something new, but it has basically been the same for at least 2,000 years. It has been and is the process of making the rule of the Crowd stronger, under the guise that this will empower the individual (and it does, in the short term – it’s just the long term where the individual must pay the price).

How does this brainlessness manifest itself? We no longer have any clear path from the current time to a better state except for our assumption. We assume that by continuing the process of equality, of “freedom” and economic empowerment, we will arrive at a Utopia, but have we seen any signs of that yet? Things get worse, but because we exist in a passive society where teh assumption of “progress” is a sacred cow, we take no clear action. Instead, we allow ourselves to be led: we are led by the economy, by popularity, or by “surprise” disasters for which we cannot prepare. We have no sense of design; our cities are a jumble of different functions that collaborate reasonably while we have cheap transportation, but reflect no particular order. Our lives are empty because there is no purpose other than self-gratification. Our hands are tied at the elbow in thousands of ways, where we reach for something that seems intuitively to be a better future, and then are reminded that it is unacceptable: we will cut someone out of the picture, cause a retarded orphan to cry, offend the sensibilities of some political entity. In short, we will transgress against the passive ones, and thus, the Crowd will rise up and smite us.

Passivity

It is almost impossible to explain to someone why passivity is destructive. After all, it is like a form of pacifism, and if conflict is eliminated, we tend to think a situation is under control. Peace is the absence of war. However, it can also be the absence of something necessary that some call “change” but to my mind is more fundamental: doing what is necessary to maintain a social order headed to ever-higher heights. If we make peace our goal, instead of doing the right thing, we have no way to get ourselves back on track once we drift toward mediocrity. We have no way to forcibly say NO to someone who is doing something retrograde and destructive. Passivity ties our hands, except for in one special circumstance. When someone violates passivity, even if for a higher goal than is currently being pursued, they are crucified, because we value peace more than we care about being on the path to something better.

Terms like “truth” and “right” and “justice” and “freedom” have become our enemies. They are too easily twisted with implication, and inevitably, those who do the twisting run off to make great profit behind the scenes while their civic-minded neighbors fight it out over the definitions – ultimately concluding nothing, because few of them understand enough philosophy to make sense out of the question. We cannot say we desire truth, because some clever nitwit will say, “Well, whose truth?” implying that we live in different worlds and therefore there is a different assessment of truth in each. We cannot say “x is right and y is wrong” for the same reason. We have lost the sense of cultural and social consensus that allows us to agree on reality not in a descriptive sense, e.g. “The tree is green,” as much in a valuative sense, as in “It’s more important to have written language than hedonism.” It is this consensus that allows civilizations to arise where none previously were, and when the consensus aims toward a higher standard for the civilization, it is what allows great civilizations to arise: Rome, Greece, India, Germany.

Our modern passivity comes about because we became distracted by wealth and power; the ones who were distracted were those who did not have wealth and power, and thus made a collective crusade out of it: this was the Crowd. Those who had self-confidence, noble bearing, and intelligence had these things already, or had no need for them, much as a Zen monk desires neither Cadillac nor CEO position. When the Crowd overwhelmed the leaders with its superior numbers, the leaders tended to fade out of the spotlight and try to survive as best they can. However, no person is an island, and when your society is run by people driven insane by greed and mortal fear, soon you too will be working for their causes and not your own. As it is today: cost of living is high and everyone works/commutes for ten hours a day. You either join the procession, or you starve in obscurity, and if you fight it, you have offended Passivity and will be beaten down as an enemy of the state.

Morality

If a cyclic view of history is adopted, the solution to this mess has already been present in the past many times, and will return when the Crowd finally screws up to the point of wrecking things, allowing some of the smart people to manipulate others into creating a civilization around a concept other than those which motivate failing civilizations (egodrama, materialism, equality of Crowd members). One thing that can be hinted at is the need for a different morality in two key ways. First, it will not be dualistic. Second, it will not be individualistic, at least in the populist sense that places the individual before all else, even sense.

When we speak of dualistic morality, we are describing the source of moral judgment in the moral system. Dualistic morality requires an absolute reason for judgment external to the reality in which we live. This can be a god, or an abstract concept, like equality, or simply a conception of “truth” which exists independently as opposed to exists as interpretation. When someone says “The truth is…” they are on dangerous ground unless they understand the alchemy of truth; it is an assessment of an action or idea in the context of the ultimate “truth” of existence, which is existence itself – otherwise known as “reality.” To say something is true is to say that it corresponds approximately to a prediction of how an action or idea will translate into the world. This is why we can say that “You will survive a ten story fall” is NOT true, unless there are mitigating circumstances. Truth is a way we interpret our thoughts alone; when we speak of things external to our thoughts, truth is a tautology, since because they exist, they are true. There is no way to encapsulate truth outside of this formula. Dualistic truth attempts to do exactly that. If we are to move forward from our current disease, as a species, we must find our truth in our thoughts as they adapt to our reality, and not try to create some Truth which we can define somewhere and force upon the Crowd, because they cannot figure it out themselves.

And what of the individual in morality? Our current morality is that of the Crowd, because we believe that preservation of the individual is the highest goal we can have. Our commandment is not “Do what is right,” but “Avoid doing what is wrong.” Do not kill. Do not offend. Do not brush aside the “rights” of another. The only exception is the primal one, which is that one may kill or offend or deny rights when the person in question has transgressed against society; can you see how passivity comes into play here? Society sets the rules, and those who disagree have no option, because their opinions themselves are even an offense. They must either find a way to frame their ideas in terms of Crowdist doctrine (not possible) or they must be silent, lest they transgress and the injured party, Society at large, take its turn to crush them.

For these reasons, when we speak of “morality” now, what we are talking about is an abstract concept with no relation to practical, here-and-now existence, and it is based in the individual, as none wish to find themselves inconvenienced by the need to do what is “right”! What we have created is the greatest illusion that any thinking being can undertake, which is the supposition that our thoughts are reality, and that we exist independently of our external world (including death). In this light, the environmental destruction by humans is entirely too clearly revealed as more than gross ignorance; we had to destroy the environment to “prove” to ourselves that only our thoughts dictate the world. Why is our society such a mess? We are distracted, all of us, by following our personal vision – to the point that we do not consider that it is contained in, and dependent on, a whole. The modern human is oblivious to the fact that his consciousness merges with a larger awareness. Therefore, he sees nothing but himself and his own desires.

Frustration

It is impossible to both live now, and be aware of the whole; one who attempts a “holistic morality” whereby one thinks outside the individual and instead asks, “What is the best order for all of this – nature, humanity, and cosmos?” will surely go insane. Daytime is occupied by function, whether in job or family, and in fending off the handful of thoughts that are repeated a million different ways by almost all of the voices around us. It’s hard for people to realize how pervasive our media is, but think about it: of the people you talk to on a daily basis, how many got their information either from product-media (meaning: media that sells stories as a product, so that truthfulness is secondary) or from someone who did? Even if you live in academia, or the rural areas of this continent, the answer is likely 75% or more.

We live in a time of inferior minds masquerading as benevolent leaders; we have eliminated the independent, realistic thinkers or driven them into hiding; we are motivated by profit and equality, which are one and the same impulse, thus we keep ourselves from rising to the real challenges that can select better minds among us. Our society has not made a bad choice of political system or economic system, but a bad choice of its most fundamental value: it has elected for Crowd domination, and from that all else has come. (Money is popular, especially among the poor, for the same reason the lottery is: one can dream that one will climb the ladder that way, and it’s an easier and more likely dream than gaining traits like nobility, intelligence and beauty. The Crowd loves easy ways to get ahead.)

And there is no escape. Society is global. It poisons air, earth and sea, so even running away to a faroff land will not stop the problem. People have tried various solutions and each has failed, depressing us further. Those who can even understand the issues in question are the smallest minority of all minorities in society. New types of government, “new” ideas about language or values, and new economic systems or new areas to make wealth are all failures. The disease is within. To fix it, we must reprogram ourselves.

PPOT vs PTSD

To change the world, we must first become what we wish it to be, and the first step in that is to think positive. The apocalyptic agenda of various political groups – leftists and far-rightists in particular – is destructive in that it is anticlimatic. They will encourage you to take desperate action because if you do not, right now, the cause will be lost. They do this because they respond to very simple emotional symbols, and to desperate situations, much like bad movies always feature lost orphans and murdered puppies and other heart-tugging symbols. This mentality is part of Crowdism. Discard it. There is time for us to act, and our actions do not need be hasty. Think positive: the world is good, and what we are going through now is one part of its cycle, and therefore, we shall be delivered from it as inexorably as we came into it.

Positive thinking takes many forms. Just saying to yourself that there is a solution will free you from the PTSD that afflicts our smartest people, who go through life tortured by the knowledge of the death-march upon which our species has embarked. Set that out of your head. If you think positive, you can see another way and act accordingly; even a small percentage of people doing this are important, because they put the lie to the Crowdist doctrine that there is no other way, and they fragment the Crowd by making its members distrust its conclusions. Positive thinking crushes fearful thinking, which is all that binds a crowd together. They’re afraid that they cannot stand alone, and cannot face the consequences of their choices, so they form what is basically a large street gang, even if they call it liberal democracy and stamp UN and ADL logos all over it.

Positive thinking delivers you from frustration and depression. It also gives you focus to work on positive things. One of the many reasons that White Nationalism is a failure doctrine for utter morons is its inherent negativity; White Nationalists are by definition people of mixed Irish-Slavic heritage who would rather sit around complaining about African-Americans that doing something positive for white people. Furthermore, they’re afraid to admit that even among white people there are divisions, and that some are better than others. That is Crowdism, and its roots are in depression and fear and underconfidence. Positive thinking builds confidence. Wherever you are in the hierarchy of life, even if you’re a paraplegic AIDS-ridden slave, if you act according to positive principles, you will not only be doing right but you will be feeling better about yourself for doing it. Positive thinking followed by positive action drives away underconfidence.

Post-Crowdism

Once you have a positive outlook, you can look into changing the psychology of our times – in yourself. Observe what the Crowd believes and how it manifests itself. Realize it is a deficiency. Then, act without that deficiency. Where others have individualistic morals, think in a holistic moral sense, where you do what is right by an external order no matter who is inconvenienced. Although people on the Internet (generally oversocialized, underconfident losers) will tell you otherwise, if you have some brains and think positively, you will rapidly get to positions of power where you can exercise this ability. Do so. You will inspire others and show how the Crowdist doctrine of “the individual ueber alles” is false.

It’s too much to outline a complete solution in this article, and no thinker worth his or her salt will do so, because once you set it down in black and white, the Crowd immediately emulates it as an unconscious attempt to discredit it. But what should be clear here is that by leaving passivity behind, you become a creator and a lover instead of a destroyer and fearer; those who claim not be destroyers, not to be afraid, to embrace difference, etc. are the ones with the greatest amount of fear, and that’s why they preach doctrines that are accessible to the biggest sheep among us. When you think positively, and outthink Crowdism, you lay the foundations for getting past this bad period of human psychology. In that is something greater than defeat of the Crowd – it is victory for all of us.

History may run in cycles, but each era has its distinctive flavor, and those form the methods by which its part in the process of history is fulfilled. In our modern time, we have uniquely united the world through centralized media, by which someone in one location produces what comes to be known as the official “truth,” and it is then distributed throughout the globe almost instantly. The people of earth, conditioned to require the absolute “truth” from central agencies on matters of commerce and governmental regulation, promptly extend the same courtesy to political and social truth as conveyed by the “official” media.

The result of this is that a small group of people create our public perceptions of events; the events happen, and the rest of us, who are fated to find out about them second-hand in any case, rely on the descriptions of those events relayed to us by this centralized source. In such a climate, it is not surprising that there are errors in our perception of reality, as all that is required is for those in the “official” truth-telling capacity to miss a detail or, more likely, be convinced for social reasons that they need to hush that detail. It will put people out of jobs; it will make people feel bad; they don’t need to know what they can do nothing about; it will not benefit your (you, personally, the guy responsible for putting out the news) career.

Who Owns Truth?

Another way of saying this is that if fifteen people witness an event and give roughly similar testimony, barring any prior agreement to collusion among them, it’s a lot more accurate than if there’s only one eye-witness who also has a vested interest in how the outcome is viewed. If the landlord of a building is the one person to witness its burning, and he claims it was the reckless conduct of the tenants and not shoddy construction that allowed the blaze to devour the complex entirely, how likely are we to wholly believe him? After all, he has a reason to lie that directly benefits his livelihood. The same can be said of our media, who eat based not on the degree of truth to their stories, but the degree of human interest. They sell drama, but not difficult truths, as those will make one unpopular enough to be bankrupt.

For this reason, it has been very slowly that discontent has built in our society, because for most people, there was never any reason to trust the official version of events until now. We were told foreign dictators were bad, so we all banded together and crushed them. We were told that we needed to buy certain products, so we did, hoping to keep our families safe and futures secure. We were told that it was important to believe certain things, as they were ideologies of the future, and through this “progress” we got to a better life; who doesn’t want that? Most of us live in small worlds, focused around family and friends and local social community, and we don’t want more than that. Nothing is more admirable, since this is a view of life that negates fear of death and embraces what life offers the individual outside of social and monetary absolutes. It’s a healthy, normal existence.

Yet these small worlds have been shattered, as despite our armies of scientists and reporters and researchers, these problems crept up on us: global warming, terrorism, mass immigration, economic collapse. It’s well and fine to have missed a few fragments of information here and there, and to be surprised by a shortfall in a government program or a new population trend, but how does something as big as global warming sneak up on us? That’s like getting ambushed by a glacier. Undoubtedly, the thought that hit many minds when after years of fighting the story, our news media and politicians finally gave in and said, “Aw shucks, this global warming thing is real,” was quite simply that either we’re being told a partial story or, more ominously, that these people do not care enough about reality to get the whole story. This puts an image in our minds of, instead of diligent and honest guardians, profiteers running the show who leave it to us to survive as we can.

With this sudden distrust of the “truth” upon which our society is based comes another sobering thought: for things to get this out of control, where we are controlled by predators who seem oblivious to our future, something must be fundamentally wrong about the way we’re governing ourselves. As said before, most people are content to lead local lives, but our world is now so interconnected that government rarely stops at the town, city, parish or county. If people in distant nations screw up and dump uranium into our oceans, we get the cancers here just as fatally as anywhere else. Should negotiations fail and nuclear war rain death upon us, our localities – which have been quietly going about life – are no longer autonomous, but targets belonging to whatever political entity incurred ire. Our lives are bound up in the fortunes of the collective, and when it errs, we are the ones who pay. How do you hold a government, or a corporation, or a world governing body responsible? You can haul out the people in office and shoot them, but that is little recompense for the vast amounts of good things destroyed by the errors of such leadership entities.

If we follow this chain of thought to its logical conclusion, then we are – as a species – ruled by distant forces who have little accountability for the decisions that affect us, and may be motivated by self-interest more than the best interests of the species as a whole. Modern people are so used to long strings of words that mean nothing, so this is restated in the vernacular: you are under the control of people who are leading you to their profit, not yours. Even more, if you resist, other people – well-meaning, normal, healthy people – will do their best to kill you, believing that they are destroying a dangerous deviant and not someone with a rational objection to the system as a whole. In other words, the world is turned upside down; truth has become a fabrication, the predators are in control, and dissent is not tolerated in any way that will have actual effect. If one were paranoiac, it would suggest an evil force in control of this world.

Deflection

Yet it is the demonic nature of this process alone that provides us a clue to its origin. No human organization in history has been so well-managed that it could pull off a conspiracy of this nature without revealing itself or collapsing in infighting. Whatever engendered this particular mess did not have a leader, or a central organizing principle, although it has manifested itself in centralized authority. A systematic change to this kind of order comes through a shared assumption, much like when a group of friends, upon perceiving their favorite bar is closed, meet at the next most likely place without having to communicate the name amongst themselves. More than a leaderless revolution, it was an unconscious one: those who brought it about had no idea they shared an ideology, or no idea what its name might be, or even why they did it. They simply did it because it was natural to do, and because nothing has since opposed it, it continues to this day in grossly simplified form.

We are tempted by the opposite conclusion, because if we were able to find a single easy cause, like removing a jam from a machine we could yank it out, and by mathematical simplicity, would have all of the good in society with the negative removed, thus an all-good society. When was the last time life was that simple? Any infection on the level of our assumptions has pervaded our society at its lowest level, that of its values and worldview. We could blame language, or x=y thinking, or sin waves of emotion, or any of the other detours that have absorbed our best liberal thinkers looking for a symbological fix to our problem, but really, these are just the devil’s messengers. What’s wrong isn’t us; it’s what we think we believe, and even if we say we want to fix it, our minds have become mesmerized by a certain outlook on the world and are unwilling to leave it. Thus our disease remains, since even when trying to excise it, we re-affirm the infection by assuming the necessity of its component parts.

It’s like the mafia boss who’s determined to root out the informer in his organization. He and his personal secretary interview all of his department heads, and after some theorizing, they put the worst of them into the bay. But the next time a bust happens, the boss realizes he’s still infected. He goes after every person he can think of, but can’t ever clear himself of the informant, until one day he’s put into jail. You can imagine his shock when the star witness comes out to confront him: his personal secretary! In our case, as moderns, the disease is worse than an informing secretary; it’s within us. There is no clearer evidence of this than our mania for deflection. Is it the Communists? Then the other side whispers: it’s the Capitalists. Is it the drug-users? The hackers? The terrorists? The Nazis? Who else can we blame – what do we do when we finally run out of people to blame? (It’s not fair to let the right off the hook either: it’s not the Negroes or the Jews that are the root of your problem, although their presence can be argued to be a symptom!)

All of these futile attempts have failed, since even when these demons have been exorcised, the disease has remained. That is not to say that these attempts have not improved the situation, only that they haven’t gotten to the core of it. Think for a moment: what sort of problem is it that one cannot identify and root out? The simple answer: one you cannot tell to another person, and therefore, even if you know it, no one else can work on the problem – and in modern society, every problem is too big for one man. Imagine working with another police inspector on this case. You can tell the guy everything except that which might potentially hurt his feelings. So the investigation goes on, and despite your partner being slower than you are, he puts his heart into it. At the end you have no answers, because both of you don’t know the answer, even though it’s in your knowledge.

The dirty little secret of the West’s collapse is that it has come from within. The extent of our modern disease is revealed by the fact that when we think this, we immediately try to blame either everyone, or no one. We are afraid to blame a process and implicate certain people as its methods. And why not? We’re not passing moral judgment, claiming them to be the spawn of Satan, as our leaders do to enemies during wartime. All we are saying is that they, by what they do, have caused a massive problem. The real social taboo broken here is the unstated obvious: in order to fix the problem, we have to limit their sainted “freedom.” Nevermind that few people actually need freedom. What they want are normal, comfortable lives, without other people intruding in upon them and telling them what to think. That’s not freedom; it’s common sense and common decency. People like to conceive of “freedom,” however, as a limitless absolute. “I can do anything I want,” they say, forgetting that most of what they actually want falls within the narrow sphere of what benefits them in a practical sense. You could make sculptures out of your own mucus… but do you need that “freedom”?

Yet any person who advocates breeching that “freedom” is portrayed to be a bad guy, which is interesting, since in times without freedom, there was not such widespread deception where a few people could control “truth” for an entire planet, even if through the quasi-voluntarily methods of television and entertainment media. To a thinking person, the fear of losing “freedom” is another type of deflection: finding something irrelevant to the cause to blame. It’s psychologically very easy, actually: to blame something external divides the world into two segments, the desired and the undesired. In actuality, it makes no sense to divide things that already exist into desired/undesired, because the only thing that can be desired is an outcome and by definition anything but that outcome is undesired – yet outcomes usually occur in partial degrees, or with modifications, so that kneejerk response makes little sense. When manipulating the masses, however, it makes sense to tell them that the world is divided into “freedom” and those who hate freedom, as they react more quickly to the positive feelings associated with “freedom” and only more slowly to the logic trap into which they fall. Heart first, then brain – even with very smart people.

Crowdism

This emotional process of trying to solve logical issues is obviously paradoxical, but it is the foundation of our modern morality, which is derived in part from Christianity but has previous antecedents; this means that while Christianity (as practiced by most, not the happy few who’ve made a real religion of it!) embraces this ambient quasi-ideology we are describing, it is not the sole origin of it. Rather, morality of this type has been with the world since its earliest days; it is not a new invention, merely a less successful one, thus one that was until recently alien to our societies because many generations ago we transcended it. It is a belief system based on appearances: emotions come before logic, personal boundaries come before the necessity of doing what is right for all, and abstract divisions of “good” and “evil” regarding intent come before a realization of the effect of any action. In short, this is a belief system which manipulates by preventing certain actions rather than by recommending others, and it attacks before any action is ever committed.

When we remove all the irrelevant theory, what becomes clear is that this is a belief system designed to protect a type of person; that is why its negative, preemptive assessment. It does not have a goal. It does not have an ideology. It is wholly negative in nature, in that it identifies certain things that are destabilizing to those who find it important, and it attempts to censure and criminalize those. It in fact replaces the idea of having a goal with the idea of not doing wrong, and thus restricts what can be done to those whose actions might be so selfish that any sort of goal would conflict with them. These sort of people might be described as passive criminals, then, since what they do is not outright criminal, but by being what is done instead of pursuing a healthy goal, and by requiring a morality that prevents others from interrupting it, it supplants the seeking of a healthy goal. It is thus a crime of omission if nothing else.

Another way to look at it is from this angle: imagine that something needs to be done for the good an entire community. Healthy people are willing to make sacrifices for this. But some would prefer to rigidly negate that proposal because it interferes with their personal fortunes or convenience. By doing this, they are dooming the community in the long run, even if it means they get to keep whatever it was they desired in the short term. These people need some kind of protection that, no matter what the overall goal is, justifies their selfishness. Even better, it should eliminate the concept of overall goal, and focus only on the individual. To do that, a morality was created which banned actions and not goals, effectively hobbling any goal-setting because any real change will always infringe upon someone’s little world. Morality is the assertion of personal reality as a higher value that physical, this-is-the-real-world-pay-attention reality.

We can diagnose it: solipsism, or perhaps a low grade sociopathy, or even in the simplest terms, selfishness. It could even be described with fancy academic terms like materialism, meaning a focus on material comfort that places all ideological concerns at distant second, or absolutism, meaning a creation of a false abstraction that governs how we see reality. What reveals its nature the most however is understanding the type of mentality that produces it. To do this, we must go to folk wisdom, in which it is recognized that what people would not do as individuals they will do as a mob. Under social pressure, people will take drugs, torture one another, steal, lie, cheat and delude themselves. If they internalize that social pressure, they will do these things without the presence of others because they are aware of the eventuality of having to interact with those others. In this sense, the mob mentality can extend to those who are alone, because in their minds the rest of the mob is always there.

This behavior transcends ideology. One can as easily assume the identity of a Green, or a modern Republican, or a radical neo-Nazi, or a harmless Democrat, and still wield this belief system. It can strike any social class, any intelligence, at any age, although it tends to be supported among the lower middle class young of moderate but not genius intelligence. It does not require awareness of its own presence; those who are its carriers never would know it by name, and most commonly believe they are fighting for something else when they strike out with it: justice, “freedom,” equality, love, peace, happiness, wealth. Even more tenacious, it is based in the emotions of the individual, so it does not succumb to rational argument. It is there because it is the intersection of a person’s emotional need and their lack of higher reasoning to keep it in check. In this sense, it is part ideology — and part pathology, or disease.

It makes the most sense however to give it a unique identification, since it is so prevalent that any other reference would be ambiguous: Crowdism. The belief, whether known in language to its bearer or not, that the individual should predominate over all other concerns is Crowdism. We name it according to the crowd because crowds are the fastest to defend individual autonomy; if any of its members are singled out, and doubt thrown upon their activities or intentions, the crowd is fragmented and loses its power. What makes crowds strong is an inability of any to criticize their members, or to suggest any kind of goal that unites people, because what makes for the best crowds is a lack of goal. Without a higher vision or ideal, crowds rapidly degenerate into raiding parties, although of a passive nature. They argue for greater “freedom.” They want more wealth. Anything they see they feel should be divided up among the crowd.

Crowdism strikes anyone who values individual comfort and wealth more than doing what is right. People of a higher mindset leave situations in a higher state of order than when they were found. This requires that people form an abstraction describing how organization works, and create in themselves the moral will to do right, and thus embark on a path that is not accessible to everyone: the smarter and more clearsighted one is, the greater likelihood exists that one is realizing things that an audience of average people have not yet comprehended. For this reason, Crowdists hate people who leave situations in a higher state of order than when they were found. These people threaten to rise above the crowd, and thus fragment the crowd by revealing individual deficiencies again, and that steals the only method of power the crowd has: superior numbers and the illusion that everyone in the crowd is in agreement as to what must be done.

In short, a crowd does not exist except where underconfidence unites people who, being unable to lead on their own, find solace in the leadership and power of others. They want to be in control, but they are afraid to lead, and thus each person in the crowd delegates his authority to others. The crowd therefore moves not by choices, but by lowest common denominator, assessing each decision in terms of what all people in the crowd have in common. Predictably, this makes its decisions of such a base nature they can be guessed in advance. A crowd derives its momentum from the need of its members coupled with their fear of their own judgment. Taking impetus from the need, it asserts itself violently, but because its only mechanism of decision-making is radical compromise, it moves passively toward predictable resolutions.

Crowdists love “competition” of a fixed nature, where a single vector determines the winner. They do not like real life competition, including evolution, as it assess the individual as a whole and does not simply rank individuals by ability. For this reason crowds love both sports events and free market capitalism, as each allow people to gain power according to a linear system. The more time you put into the system with the sole goal of making profit, excluding all else, the more likely it is that you can get wealth – and it can happen to anyone! That is the promise that makes crowds flock to these ideas. It is like the dream of being a rock star, or a baseball hero, or a billionaire: what makes it attractive is the idea that anyone can do it, if they simply devote themselves to a linear path of ascension – one that is controlled by the whims of the crowd. The crowd decides who is a baseball hero, or what to buy and thus who to make rich. Control without control.

Of course, since the crowd has disclaimed all true idealism, its only ideology is that of personal gain. It is by nature opposed to culture, since culture establishes a values system against which one can refer any potential choice to determine its viability in the community’s preference. Crowdists like to replace culture with the grandfather of multiculture, which is the idea of a facilitative society, or one in which the only goal is to satisfy its members. In this vision, a common goal or even standard of society is not needed. Society exists for its members to fulfil their personal needs, and it explicitly disclaims the ability or need to oversee those, unless they violate the basic tenets of Crowdism, of course. Crowdists naturally embrace both internationalism, which denies local culture in favor of an international culture of novelty, and multiculture, which mixes cultures with nothing in common and claims to be satisfied with any result. Crowdism is not a decision any more than cancer is a design for a new organism; it is the lack of decision, of goal, of design. It is not random, however, so unlike chaos, it is a predictable and rarely-changing order. Some would call it entropy.

Any ideology is automatically dominated by Crowdists. They were at home as Marxist radicals, but equally happy as conservative American capitalists. Crowdism is not an ideology, but an emotional response. They view any ideology as a means to an end, and that end is Crowdism itself, although Crowdists cannot put this in words – they’re part of a Crowd, remember, which means they don’t make choices as much as force compromise, and by the nature of something akin to dialectical materialism, compromises always move “forward” although toward eternally the same goals. They will dominate any democracy, and turn it away from encouraging excellence toward subsidizing weakness. They will dominate a totalitarian state, humbling it by making its appeals to its proletariat and winning their allegiance through unreasonable concessions. They will use corporations to dominate a culture, producing products that reward those of a Crowdist mentality, while ignoring the needs and desires of those of a higher mentality. Even a non-ideology will be dominated, as Crowdists will use social pressure where there is a lack of decision-making.

Characteristics

Among all human phenomena, Crowdism is unique in that it turns timorous individuals into a dangerously assertive group. Crowdism appeals to those who are underconfident. They’re unsure of their abilities and fear that, in a competition like that of evolution, where many factors at once must be measured and one’s judgment and character are essential, they might not come out ahead. In fact, they have a sneaking suspicion they’ll come out behind. This is only logical, since those with such abilities have no need of a crowd, and therefore only very rarely become Crowdists (usually in cases of: drug addiction, child abuse, mental illness). The average Crowdist needs a crowd to do what he or she could not do alone, including not in the least the process of making decisions. The crowd provides anonymity and the illusion of a cause. Crowdists are underconfident, thus incapable of the kind of assertive and creative action by which one glances at a situation and calls the shots; therefore, all of their modes of action are passive. They cannot strike without first having been struck, but it’s perfectly acceptable for them to provoke others with a thousand small irritations until the other responds, then to retaliate with full force. Notice how America has entered her wars: placing ships within range of Spanish saboteurs, sending passenger liners full of weapons to be torpedoed, cancelling steel shipments while giving a fortune in weapons to an enemy. It is a brilliant strategy, in that one never has to make a decision: one is always the injured party and therefore justified in responding, even if it ends up being to one’s advantage.

Crowdists have a great fear of mortality, which is linked to their fear of evolution. They do not have a value higher than their own lives; there is nothing for which, unbidden, they will give their lives (although they will gladly give them, in anger, when having provoked an enemy, they are able to embark upon their “justified” response). This shirking personality and lack of self-confidence manifests itself in a form of cognitive dissonance that creates an inverse response to the failings of confidence: the less the person feels confident, the more egomaniacal they are, at the expense of being able to accurately perceive external reality. As a result of their need to supplant underconfidence with ego, they turn off any external feedback which could prove critical of their selves, and therefore lock themselves into a world composed entirely of the self. This creates a crowd of little queens. They demand “proof” – someone must hold up something tangible and show it to them, and have it be simple enough that everyone in the crowd yes even the deaf mute hunchback can appreciate its significance; this is why crowds do well with butchered babies, torpedoed ocean linears, gas chambers and gassing Kurds, but do poorly with concerns about global warming, genetic fragmentation, or pervasive ignorance. In fact, they seem to treasure their ignorance in the same way that higher people treasure their innocence. Crowdists like to keep things simple so as not to distract from the basic focus (themselves).

The term “lowest common denominator” has almost become a cliche in our society in that it explains so much. A group of people – an electorate, a committee, a mob – gets together, and soon a once-promising idea has through compromise and censorship (the removal of that which might offend, or shock, or be contrary to already-well-established tastes) become distilled down to something completely acceptable to every member of the crowd. The only problem is that, in the process, it has come to resemble every other action that the crowd has been known to take. No matter – the same old thing dressed up as something new serves a dual function, in that it both provides novelty and, by virtue of being essentially similar to everything else, avoids presenting people with stimulus they cannot recognize and thus immediately know they can handle. Low self-confidence reveals itself in situations where the unexpected occurs. Crowdists like to minimize that by dumbing everything down to the lowest common denominator, at which point they feel they dominate it and in that state of control are no longer threatened by it.

The paradox of crowdism is that because these people refuse to have a long term vision, they have nothing worth dying for, and therefore their lives are empty of meaning and they respond with the hollow attempts to control that comprise Crowdism. It is as a pathology much like overeating, in which case one confuses the signal for being full, which eliminates psychological doubt, with the process of eating, and hopes that by eating again and again to banish doubt (which increasing doubt in direct proportion to girth!). If they had faith, or belief in doing something which does not immediately reward them, or the vision to see the benefit in doing things which help the community as a whole but in the distant future, they would not have this gnawing emptiness. Civilizations in the past saw fit to make such people into serfs and servants, such that others could give them causes, and they could both be kept from being destructive and given a raison d’etre which would sustain them for their natural lives. Crowdists will never admit it, but secretly, they have a desire to submit to authority because they do not trust their own judgment.

Indeed, there is somewhat of a sadomasochistic nature to Crowdism. For every crowd that exists, there will be some who manipulate it expertly; as in a microprocessor, most of the circuits do the mechanical work of computation while a few are responsible for at key moments switching the flow of data. Such is it that some of the voices who shout out at opportune times are to redirect the crowd, such as the classic “He’s getting away!” screamed by an anonymous crowd member and provoking a stampede to bring down the suspect. Others simply profit from the crowd. By far the best way to profit from a crowd is to pretend to be its servant, as its memory is short and being underconfident it loves to be flattered, and therefore rarely notices that its servants are robbing it blind until it is too late for anything but revenge; the thief is killed, yes, but the money has been spent, and the crowd feels even less confident when its blunder comes to life, so it rages on to the next event in a search for something of substance to occupy it. Always eating and never full. But the manipulators of a crowd eat well.

If one were to divide up a population according to “Crowdist theory,” there would be many sheep, a few born leaders and a larger group of shrewd people who lack the capacity of a true leader, but are mentally agile enough to manipulate the crowd and make a profit from it. These are your Josef Stalins, Ken Lays, Ivan Boesky, George W. Bushes. They are cynical enough to realize that the “ideology” of the crowd is nothing but lies, and its actual agenda is power. They recognize that the crowd loves gaining power through revenge on those with more talent, intelligence, beauty and character than itself, and these manipulators create bogeymen and justifications faster than the crowd can decode them. However, to be a manipulator in a crowd is to be acutely conscious of belonging in the crowd; after all, if one did not need the crowd, something else would have been the path. Thus manipulators both love and loathe the crowd, appreciating it for being the vehicle of their own greatness, but hating it for being necessary and thus constantly forcing them into the role of gentle servant when their inner wolf-personality seeks to escape and manifest itself. Manipulators are like drug dealers: they realize too late that their profession will consume them by forcing them into a function, and thereby eliminating any hope they ever had of making decisions about their own lives. They follow the function, and therefore, all of their choices are reactions; there are no independent choices to be made.

The dominant characteristic of a crowd, as mentioned by F.W. Nietzsche, is the desire for revenge: they detest anyone gifted by nature with more than they have, whether it is wealth or natural traits. Much like ancient tribes who believed that eating the organs of an enemy would transfer his power to the eater, Crowdists believe that destroying others raises the Crowdist’s own stature. Their primary weapon is equality. By insisting on one level for all people, they have an excuse to curtail the higher abilities of those who rise above the crowd. Further, they have the ultimate weapon, in that since equality sounds good on an emotional level, it is perceived as a good, and thus anyone who resists its advance (“progress”) is automatically a bad guy who has transgressed, and thus against him or her retaliation can be launched. This is the ultimate threat of a crowd, which is expressed in a simple syllogism: I. Our way is the path of good intentions, equality. II. If you are not for our path, you are against good intentions and will attempt to destroy us. III. Because you will attempt to destroy us, we will destroy you first. It is a mental trap of epic proportions: if one joins the crowd, one has agreed to limit one’s own abilities to the lowest common denominator; if one resists the crowd, one is styled as the aggressor and destroyed by direct force. At the point when the question of with-us-or-against-us has been asked, the battle is already lost, as the Crowd have gathered behind the questioner with torches that could just as easily be applied to the dwelling of the questioned as toward a feast in her honor.

Effects

The effects of Crowdism take many generations to fully permeate a society. Indeed, Crowdism is like the effects of aging on each of us: we start aging the instant we are born, but at some point, the effects of years have piled up enough to carry us off. Crowdism exists in every society, but to varying degrees, and as societies age, it increases. Almost all societies on the brink of death are totally dominated by Crowdism, which helps carry them off as it paralyzes the decision making capability; if your population sees only its own gratification, who is going to mobilize it to fight an enemy while the enemy is still distant? By the time the Vandals reach Rome, the battle is lost, but the Crowd will never respond until directly attacked, so will blissfully ignore the assailants until the battle has begun. Disorganized, the crowd responds slowly and then panics, abandoning the empire to its lessers, who promptly destroy it. It is for this reason that everywhere a great society once stood, there is now a barely technological, semi-literate society distinguished mostly by its lack of ambition. These are people soul-weary with combat and with power, and they have opted for the stage after Crowdist, which is a form of highly granularized apathy. (There’s no point studying this in America until after the Chinese, sensing our distraction and inner weakness, invade and crush our centralized authorities, at which point those less-fortunate populations within and surrounding us will consume the spoils.)

In fact, throughout its life span, Crowdism promotes apathy by forcing inane decisions on people and threatening them with passive aggression if they refuse. This could be seen most clearly in the former Soviet Union, where people quietly worked around any number of absurd proclamations and dysfunctional government agencies. They realized that things were hopelessly broken, but that the first person to speak up about it would be torn to pieces by the crowd, thus these things had to be tolerated. And what a disgusting word “tolerance” is – it means to recognize something’s inaptitude, but to ignore it and even accept it. Accept mediocrity. Accept failure. Accept the lack of a goal. This beats people down into a state of submission which periodically polarizes itself and becomes violent, as if all of the psychological energy kept suppressed when given an outlet explodes to the surface in a form beneath rationality or even an organized emotional state. It is this form of passivity that is idealized by religions such as Judaism, which clearly arose in a civilization which had already reached this degree of apathy, and therefore was little more than a survival guide. Some would say that Asia went down this path thousands of years before the West, and thus through submission achieved the uniformity for which Asian culture is famous.

The “morality” of the Crowdists affirms the importance of the individual over doing what is right. A society based on this lack of choice, and lack of goal, is inherently frustrating, and thus breaks down all but that which Nietzsche called the “last man.” The last man is someone who cares about nothing but his own material comfort. Does he have an expensive car? Enough to watch on television? Get to go out to the clubs that others covet? And have a trophy girlfriend? — if so, he is happy. No plan for the future, and no significance to these things, other than that he owns them and therefore can construe his personality – that externalized “ego” that we insist is a social construct, a form of personal marketing – as a success as a result of them. The last man does not fight the good fight; he instead does what benefits him. He looks upon ideological conflict as silly, because he is inherently submissive to the external order and thus never thinks of changing it. His revenge upon it is to profit from it, and to consider himself smarter and better than all the others for not having been fooled by value, and possibly having given up his life or his career in some crusade to do what is “right,” instead having been more competitive and shrewd and enriched himself while others fought ideological battles. The last man is an opportunist, a profiteer. He is like a Satanic Zen monk, in that none of his energy is wasted on emotional display. It all goes toward The Bottom Line, a.k.a. making him feel better about himself (an intangible state) through an increase in tangible things like wealth, prestige, and power.

Last men are the type of people who are manipulators of the Crowd, only a more advanced version than the somewhat masochistic “leaders.” A last man simply takes and has no emotional reaction. Where a leader like G.W. Bush or Kim Jong-Il is cynical, and kleptocratic, he still has some degree of emotional response in him; in contrast, a Stalin is without emotion entirely and feels no reason to respond to his changing fortunes, as he is busy focusing on the only thing which matters, which is increasing them. When things go badly, he schemes for recovery, wasting no time on reaction or indulgent displays of emotion. A Bush might have some days of depression, or stumble in public, but a Stalin remains impassive, his iron grip unchanging, knowing that only discipline and a lack of emotions will restore his power. Over time, the last men rise in power through their lack of response, and those with emotional excess descend through an inability to stay focused on the goal. When one descends, one becomes part of the crowd. We call those who have descended Undermen, because they have viewed the challenges of life on several levels and opted to run away or take a course of profiteering, yet have not succeeded even in that through their lack of discipline, which is essentially the ability to see that events distant in time are as important as events proximate in time, because time is continuous and for plans to succeed one must unite the moments in an ongoing series of planned developments. Undermen do not plan. They do not think. They react; where the last man is deliberate, the Underman is impulsive and fired with a consumptive desire for revenge, since to an Underman the world is grossly unfair: because his reactions are out of control, he cheats himself out of everything good that comes his way, and therefore always feels that others have been gifted where he is deprived.

Undermen are sabotage incarnate. Like other Crowdists, they are passive in nature, and therefore will never directly assault an enemy. To live among them however is to constantly clean up after them, and to double-check anything they do, knowing that more often than not they will subconsciously leave things in defective and dangerous states, hoping in their inner minds that others who are more fortunate than them will be destroyed. Where true last men plan their pillaging and execute it with detail, Undermen execute clumsy and violent thefts. Undermen like to live in their own filth and keep others out of the clubhouse of their filth, associating around them others that they can dominate. Undermen exist at all stages of the Crowdist process, but it is most revelatory to point out that a successful Crowdist revolt will after many generations have converted the entire population into Undermen, and thus have plunged the civilization into disorganized, self-afflicted third world status for the next thousand or more generations. Undermen are saprophytes. They compensate for lack of higher function in themselves by destroying those who do have it, or the works of those who did, under the assumption that if it cannot be seen it will not exist to remind them of their essential spiritual hollowness.

Back to Now

The Crowdist dilemma puts us modern humans in a bad situation. As the reader may recall from the first paragraphs of this document, we are manipulated by centralized reality representations that are subject to the same influences Crowdism places on all other reality. The weapon of Crowdists is passivity; if they are “offended,” their retaliation is justified, because they are the blameless ones bringing us the progressive and superior doctrine of equality. Equality of course does not allow us to tolerate offense, because if anyone feels less than equal, the crowd falls apart and cannot protect equality. The logic behind crowdism is like a musical scale, in that if one starts on any note and runs through the logic, soon one has followed the scale back to its origin in a repeating, endless pattern. The crowd in its view is always right, and its goal is to remove those who would prove it be a paper tiger, e.g. only a crowd of underconfident people and not the ultimate authority on morality it would like to pretend to be.

Looking at our situation practically, we who are not yet absorbed by the Crowd are in a rough place: we cannot strike out against the crowd, and yet we cannot continue to tolerate it, or it will eventually reduce our civilization to third-world status through backhanded destruction of all things higher than its non-goal intentions. Even more, as it has crept within our society, it has spread its agenda of destruction against any higher ideas or ideals. Crowdists triumph through greater numbers, and with each generation of Crowdist control, more people submit out of exhaustion, and thus swell the numbers of Crowdists. It is not a conspiracy; it is a cancer. Since Crowdists have the purchasing power in our society, and the popularity, they ignore any higher visions. A product designed for those who are not Crowdists will not be boycotted, only bypassed. Those who speak up about the truth of the situation, or any of the details associated with the truth that can be construed as offensive (women and men are not equal, races are not equal, individuals are not equal, decisions are not all equal) will be branded a heretic and, while no overt action is taken against them, they will passively be denied opportunity until they accept their destiny as a janitor or in rage against the injustice lash out, become an aggressor and are killed. Remember, Crowdism is negative logic. It does not set out to establish an ideal as much as remove those with ideals, as those conflict with its paradoxical worldview, which is that of facilitating individuals rather than uniting individuals with a goal. Crowdism is anti-aspiration, and anti-organic. It only approves of systems where one individual is in power, or all are equally in power, and thus nothing gets decided.

Yet society continues its decline, and with the appearance of Really Bad News like global warming and economic instability, there is again chance for change. During the Great Depression, America could have easily swung into a Communist state; during the Viet Nam war, political instability led to directional changes (unfortunately, both options were and are Crowdist to the bone). We are heading toward another such nodal point in the neural net of details that determine whether our civilization heads in an ascendant way, or descends back into third world status, from which we all came and toward which all societies fall. With each failure of our trusted information sources, and with each incontrovertible proof that our “truths” are not reality, we get closer to radical alteration in course. The problem is of course that, as in most revolutions, ours is mostly likely to take with it the assumptions of its previous masters, and thus to re-create their reign with new faces. This is why accurate diagnosis of Crowdism is essential. One can switch to Communism, to Tribalism, or even to Anarchy, but as long as the assumptions of Crowdism remain, the path is barely altered and the end result is the same. If we wish to transcend Crowdism, we must first restore our heroic outlook, by which there are things for which we’re willing to die, ideals we hold more precious than life itself. By thinking in parallel, and not in terms of organizing everybody as equals to undergo the same mechanical process and thus cure us all at once, we can move the best people among us to greater heights and slowly bring the rest of us to our respective places. We can deny equality in all of its forms, as it is a crazy doctrine that ends in the norming of us all. Localizing government and turning away from single points of informational “truth” helps as well. Even more, we can finally break the taboo barrier and tell individuals that they cannot have it their way and also participate in a non-failing society.

All of these methods will help defeat the Crowdist disease, but it is not defeated by method alone. It requires that we take on a reorganization of our own minds so that we avoid falling into the underconfident, anti-heroic thoughts of Crowdist. It requires that we value actual truth above any socially convenient illusion, or friendly distortion of the truth. We must face facts and stop taking them personally. To an awakened mind, our faults and strengths are visible, and so what we think of as hidden will soon be no secret to the post-Crowdist people who will rise if we succeed. For this reason, we must transcend our personal pretense and ability to be offended. The truth will set us free – perhaps not, but the pursuit of truth for its own sake will free us from the cancerous plague of Crowdism and its millennial reign over our society.